‘Nobody’s ever campaigned like I have for midterms’, Trump says in Mississippi
Donald Trump has taken the stage in Corinth, Mississippi at a rally in support of Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, and began by suggesting that he is determined to reverse the historical pattern that midterm elections almost always go against the party of the president elected two years earlier.
In a hoarse voice, Trump claimed that his rallies have “totally changed the dialogue” around the campaign.
“For some reason, presidents don’t do well in the midterm, no matter how good they are, even if they’re great, like us,” Trump said. “But I will say, nobody has ever campaigned- nobody’s ever campaigned like I have for midterms.”
The president’s remarks are ongoing, and so far have mostly moved on from attacks on the Democratic nominee for Senate, Scott Colom, who was campaigning outside the arena before the rally, speaking to Trump supporters on line for the event, to repeating his claim that the US is experiencing a “golden age” of prosperity. The president did not mention high inflation and gasoline prices, caused by his tariffs on imported goods and the war he started with Iran.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Donald Trump campaigned in Corinth, Mississippi in support of Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and told the crowd his rallies have “totally changed the dialogue”. “Nobody’s ever campaigned like I have for midterms,” he said.
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A vocal protester then attempted to engage the president in some dialogue, on the subject of his ballroom, and where it might be most appropriately located.
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The justice department charged former FBI director James Comey on Monday with two counts of leaking information related to national defense, the third time the Trump administration has filed criminal charges against one of Donald Trump’s most despised foes.
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Trump lashed out in racist terms at his predecessor, Barack Obama, for joking over the weekend that his renovation of the White House, with “gold everywhere”, has “the White House looking like Saddam Hussein open a Cheesecake Factory.”
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Trump said that the comeback victory of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, “looked like another rigged election, frankly.”
Trump screens edited portion of CNN report on his falling popularity
Donald Trump finished speaking in Mississippi, after a relatively brief, for him, 83-minute speech.
Before he closed his remarks, as he has at previous rallies, the president screened two short clips, edited from CNN segments first broadcast in August and September on polling data that flatters him.
The first was a 43-second clip of CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, showing CNN viewers in September that Trump remains very popular with self-described “Maga Republicans,” which is to say people who describe themselves as loyal to his Make America Great Again movement.
“Maga GOP on Trump. In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, he got 99% of the Maga GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100%, but it was 99% percent,” Enten said in the first part of the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the Maga GOP. It’s 98%; that is, there’s been no real decline in Maga support.”
“Look, now in terms of the congressional vote, 98% of them say they’re going to be voting for House Republican candidates,” Enten said in the second part of the clip. “So, that support is actually really holding up strong. It’s really, really strong when it comes to Maga GOP and Republicans holding on to that vote.”
However, a look at the full 14-minute segment from late September shows that what the White House edited out was Enten carefully explaining that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans who do not describe themselves as Maga loyalists had suffered a sharp drop, plunging from +56 points in the 2024 election to just +7 points in September 2026.
“You know, when it comes to non-Maga, this is where we’ve absolutely seen Donald Trump’s numbers plummet into the ocean,” Enten said.
The president also screened for his supporters a portion of a prior CNN segment, from August of this year, in which Enten showed viewers that according to polling conducted in May, Trump was, at that time, called the president Republicans most admire by 53% of Republicans, ahead of Ronald Reagan at 18% and Abraham Lincoln at 8%.
Trump is so fond of these two cherry-picked pieces of data, from months ago, that he included both in his 1,300-word social-media tirade against the comedian Bill Maher on Sunday.
Trump cited them as supposed proof that Maher was wrong to say that the president is unpopular. “I have High Ratings and, more importantly, he said that I’m losing the support and approval of the Republican Party when, in fact, CNN just came out with a Poll showing that I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” Trump wrote.
Given that the president has repeatedly screened the clip of Enten clearly saying these were his ratings with Maga Republicans, not the part y as a whole, in a poll conducted by Fox, not CNN, in September, this is not the evidence he seems to think it is.
In Mississippi, a protester disrupts Trump’s speech with advice about where his ballroom should be located
At a Republican campaign rally in Mississippi, a protester disrupted Donald Trump’s speech just after the president had devoted about 10 minutes of his remarks to boasting about his White House renovations and the ballroom he is building in place of the demolished East Wing.
Trump was responding to criticism from his predecessor, Barack Obama, who said over the weekend that the president was spending most of his time on garish renovations, and the construction of a grand ballroom.
As Trump started to move on to reciting misleading statistics about his handling of the economy, a protester interrupted him and could be heard shouting as he was dragged away that the president should “shove that ballroom up your fat ass!”
Trump claims ‘one of my top people got killed’ in Washington DC before he deployed federal forces
Speaking to supporters in Mississippi on Monday, Donald Trump claimed that, before he deployed federal forces to Washington DC last year, crime was so rampant in the nation’s capital that “one of my top people got killed” in a carjacking.
“It was terrible, you couldn’t go to a restaurant. People would walk to the White House, they’d get mugged or killed,” Trump said.
“One of my top people got killed,” the president added, either revealing an incident for the first time, or fabricating a claim on the spot. “Driving up, I guess, waiting for his wife to come out of an office building, bring her home, and this guy comes up and wants the car and shoots him right through the head. Dead. It was terrible. And we don’t have that anymore.”
The president seemed to be referring to the 2024 murder of a former Trump administration official, Mike Gill, who served as an aide to the chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission during his first term.
‘Nobody’s ever campaigned like I have for midterms’, Trump says in Mississippi
Donald Trump has taken the stage in Corinth, Mississippi at a rally in support of Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, and began by suggesting that he is determined to reverse the historical pattern that midterm elections almost always go against the party of the president elected two years earlier.
In a hoarse voice, Trump claimed that his rallies have “totally changed the dialogue” around the campaign.
“For some reason, presidents don’t do well in the midterm, no matter how good they are, even if they’re great, like us,” Trump said. “But I will say, nobody has ever campaigned- nobody’s ever campaigned like I have for midterms.”
The president’s remarks are ongoing, and so far have mostly moved on from attacks on the Democratic nominee for Senate, Scott Colom, who was campaigning outside the arena before the rally, speaking to Trump supporters on line for the event, to repeating his claim that the US is experiencing a “golden age” of prosperity. The president did not mention high inflation and gasoline prices, caused by his tariffs on imported goods and the war he started with Iran.
A three-judge panel of a US appeals court on Monday ruled 2-1 against the Trump administration, denying a request to block California from counting mail ballots from people on a list of more than 20,000 registered voters the federal government alleges are likely noncitizens.
The two judges who concurred on the majority decision were Mark Bennett, who was nominated to the bench by Donald Trump in 2018, and Gabriel Sanchez, who was nominated by Joe Biden in 2021. The dissenting judge, Patrick Bumatay, was also nominated by Trump.
Sam Levine
The justice department charged former FBI director James Comey on Monday with two counts of leaking information related to national defense, the third time the Trump administration has filed criminal charges against one of Donald Trump’s most despised foes.
The charges, filed in federal court in Washington DC, provide few details about what Comey is alleged to have leaked. The government alleges that the former FBI director leaked the information in 2016 and conspired with an unnamed person to give the information to a national news outlet.
Patrick Fitzgerald, Comey’s attorney, said the charges were related to a 5 October 2016 New York Times article that had already been investigated by prosecutors. The case was filed through a criminal maneuver known as an “information” – meaning it was not approved by a grand jury. While prosecutors will eventually have to have the charges approved by a grand jury, filing the charges through an information appears to have been an effort to quickly get the criminal charges in against Comey before the 10-year statute of limitations expires.
“Ten years after the article was published, the government filed an ‘information’ against Mr Comey that was not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury. It purports to charge Mr Comey with crimes he did not commit,” Fitzgerald said in a statement.
In a court filing unsealed on Monday, Comey’s lawyers argued the indictment should be dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired and it had been twice investigated and determined no charges should be filed. They also argued that the law required an indictment, not an information, within the 10-year statute of limitations.
NAACP denounces ‘blatantly racist attacks’ in Michigan Senate race
In a statement released on Monday, the president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, denounced a wave of Islamophobic attacks on Dr Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, from Republicans, including Donald Trump.
Johnson said:
“The blatantly racist attacks surrounding the Michigan Senate race are unacceptable and disgusting. It’s the same ugly, divisive tactics we’ve seen used during the darkest chapters of the South’s history. Race should never be used as a tool to scare anybody or try to prevent them from voting their conscience. This behavior is grotesque and undemocratic, and cannot under any circumstance be tolerated from anyone holding or seeking elected office.”
Trump lashes out at Obama for joking ‘he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory’
Before boarding Air Force One to fly to Mississippi for a campaign rally on Monday, Donald Trump was asked to respond to his predecessor, Barack Obama, joking over the weekend that his renovation of the White House, with “gold everywhere”, has “the White House looking like Saddam Hussein open a Cheesecake Factory.”
While rightwing media outlets have tried to cast Obama’s joke as a jibe at patrons of the restaurant chain – despite a report that his own family frequented the chain during his presidency – Cara Castronuova, a former reality TV fitness trainer now covering the White House for LindellTV, seemed to get confused about the talking point when she asked Trump for comment.
“Do you have a response to Obama,” she asked, “who made fun of the Cheesecake Factory, comparing it to the White House?”
“No,” Trump began before immediately reversing himself with a detailed, 500-word defense of his renovations, woven through with an attack on Obama, the nation’s first Black president, for supposedly being unbothered by “dirt and filth”, channeling a well-known racist trope.
“I’ve taken care of the White House. I fixed it with the finest artisans in the world. We’ve reskinned it. It was in horrible shape,” Trump said, in part.
“Guys like Obama, they would pass the front door, they’d see the broken masonry; they’d see the broken- the beautiful pilasters that were all broken, for years they were broken, and he wouldn’t notice because he doesn’t notice that,” Trump said. “He doesn’t notice dirt and filth that hadn’t been cleaned, where the walls hadn’t been cleaned for years. He doesn’t notice areas that haven’t been painted.”
“So it’s very easy for me to do,” Trump continued. “I do it very very simply because it’s my nature. You know, I’m a very clean person, and the White House was in terrible shape.”
“We have to explain that to Obama because he doesn’t understand it, because he’s not a smart guy,” Trump went on. “We have to explain to Obama that the White House is a symbol of America, and it has to be maintained properly.
“Guys like Obama don’t see it. You don’t see dirt. He doesn’t see filth. He doesn’t see broken ornaments on a building,” Trump added.
The president then turned to the camera to address Obama directly through the lens. “The White House – to president Obama – is a symbol of America. It has to be clean. The columns can’t be broken. The bricks can’t be falling off from under the plaster. And for you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president.”
Shrai Popat
Reporting from Waterville, Maine
In Waterville, a town of around 16,000 people, Troy Jackson took the stage at a local theater, just a week before the midterm elections where he’s hoping to oust Susan Collins, the long-serving Republican incumbent, in the US Senate.
He was joined on stage by Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who rallied the crowd of about 150.
“You know, we’ve had a medical emergency in Washington. Every Republican in the United States Senate has had their spine surgically removed,” Warren said, while blasting the Trump administration’s agenda, which has seen the price of gas and heating oil skyrocket across the country as the war with Iran continues.
Mainers are feeling the pinch acutely, particularly as the state braces for winter, where temperatures will soon drop to below freezing.
“Why is all this happening? Because people wanted more money. Billionaires had to have more money. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense,” Jackson said. “It could end Tuesday … when we take the Senate.”
The US Senate race in Maine is neck-and-neck, with most polls showing Jackson and Collins virtually tied. In each recent election, however, Collins has defied political gravity, and defied the odds while branding herself as an independent comfortable breaking with the rest of her party (and Trump by extension). Jackson is banking on the deep-seated anti-Trump animus that’s sweeping the country to pull off an upset.
Trump makes baseless claim Lula’s victory in Brazil ‘looked like another rigged election’
Speaking to reporters as he left for a campaign rally in Mississippi on Monday, Donald Trump said that the comeback victory of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, “looked like another rigged election, frankly.”
“It was a terrible look, for the world,” Trump said, apparently referring to the court-ordered extension in voting hours after widespread reports that supporters of the president had been hindered in getting to the polls by public transportation outages.
“You know, elections have to be indisputable — and it looked very bad to me,” the US president added. “It looked so corrupt.”
None of the reporters in the limited press pool, after reporters from CNN and Politico were again blocked from taking part, pointed out to Trump that Brazil’s supreme court only extended voting hours across the nation by two hours after requests from both candidates.
The correspondent who was questioning Trump was Cara Castronuova a former reality TV fitness trainer now covering the White House for LindellTV, the streaming platform created by Mike Lindell, the election conspiracy theorist pillow salesman.
As our colleagues in Brazil reported earlier, the president of Brazil’s electoral court, justice Kassio Nunes Marques, who was appointed by the Bolsonaro’s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, said that extending voting hours had caused “no change” to the election result.
Asked if he intended to intervene in any way, Trump said: “Well, I’m not running Brazil. I’m running the USA. And I just thought that the election was – I like Lula. I get along with him very well. I just think it had a very bad look, the election, the way it was tabulated. The extension given was very strange.”
